


Patchwork Monster

by SmallSith



Category: InuYasha - A Feudal Fairy Tale
Genre: Angst, Everything is terrible, Existential Angst, F/M, Heavy Angst, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Implied/Referenced Suicide attempt, Self-Hatred, Suicidal Thoughts, The Author Regrets Nothing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-06
Updated: 2016-01-06
Packaged: 2018-05-12 02:06:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,182
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5649733
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SmallSith/pseuds/SmallSith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Greed and love and hatred and despair came together to create you, and they are all that you are. But they are not yours. You are made of other people’s desires, nothing about you is your own. Made as you are made from spare parts, from things that the world had no use for, you can never know the freedom of being anything but the sum of your parts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Patchwork Monster

You are a patchwork monster, and you are made of hatred and greed and despair. You are made of the bandit Onigumo’s lust and greed and despair, and you are made of the hatred and avarice of the demons who devoured his soul. Greed and love and hatred and despair, these came together to create you, and they are all that you are. But they are not yours. You are made of other people’s desires, nothing about you is your own. Made as you are made from spare parts, from things that the world had no use for, you can never know the freedom of being anything but a preprogrammed monstrosity.

The bandit Onigumo’s lust for the priestess Kikyou and the demons’ hatred of her became your lust and hatred, feelings you neither asked for nor wanted. Their shared desire for the jewel of four souls. You both hate and love the jewel, as you both hate and love _her_. You wish you felt neither, for jewel nor priestess, but you have no choice in that matter.

You hate her with such force that at times it surprises you that the sheer volume of hatred you harbor for her doesn’t crush you underneath it. It is the same crushing hatred you feel for yourself. You wish she had never rescued the bandit, never let him live to love her. You wish her act of kindness, done before you were even born, had not happened, had not forced you to love her. You hate her for that kindness, for allowing your existence to become a possibility.

The demons who came together to make up one half of your soul detested her, and so you were born detesting her too. And so the hatred you harbor for her is only half yours- the demons will always have hated her first, will always have forced you to come into being hating her.

But you made that hatred your own. Born out of your loathing for your own existence, you began to hate her anew, for allowing you to come into being as you are. And after all, how could you not hate her? Hate is what you are, hate is half of what made you. 

The feelings that dying bandit had for her- they were what made you, too, and they're just as much yours and not yours as the demons’ hatred. You never wanted to love her. You never wanted to feel anything for her, but you were born with someone else’s feelings, and you cannot get rid of them without destroying yourself. 

You have tried everything you can think of, but you cannot change the circumstances of your birth. The most you could do is kill yourself, but you can’t even do _that._ You can’t die. In your early days, you would hide in the cave where you were born, curled up in the ashes where you had burned everything down around you and praying to be unmade, but your pleas went unanswered. You’ve tried doing it yourself- you’ve tried, you’ve tried _everything_ and nothing _works._ At times you sob until your eyes bleed, that you can’t even _die. _The sheer cruelty of the world for allowing you to exist astounds you.__

__And the worst of it is that your despair isn’t even your own, just an echo of the despair of a greedy, lustful man dying on a cave floor, unable to move, giving up everything in order to become something new._ _

__There are times when you wonder, if he had known the existence he would create, what kind of life you would have, he would have, because as much as you deny it, you _are_ him. You wonder, if he had known, would he still have gone through with it, or would he have chosen to die? You wish he had simply chosen to die._ _

__You don't want his feelings, don’t want his heart or his soul, don’t want anything from him. But you have no choice, even now- from the moment you were born, the desires of the dead have been forced upon you. The desire for the Shikon no Tama that drove the demons who make up your other half, the desire of Onigumo for the priestess Kikyou._ _

__They are not _yours,_ and when you were newly born you couldn’t understand- those feelings were not you own, why wouldn't they go away? You hated being forced to feel this, being forced to feel someone else's twisted, parasitic love for a person you wish had stayed dead. And you still do, and still you can't get rid of it, not without destroying yourself. Sometimes you want to. But you _can't,_ you physically _can't,_ and it tears you apart inside. You cannot die._ _

__There are times you can't stand your own reflection, can't stand yourself. You hate what you are- an abomination. Your existence is an affront before god, and you hate it. But no matter how much your own existence as this _thing,_ this _monster,_ makes you sick, you are horrified to discover that you still don't want to die. Your own desire to live makes you want to puke. Instead, you take it out on anyone you can find, because while the cruelty isn’t yours, the same as the love and the hatred and the greed, at least it gives you something to _do_ besides lie in a cave a pray to die._ _

__You kill the priestess first, set her up to kill her lover, and as you watch your work unfold, you are unsure whether you did it so you could have her, or if you did it because how _dare_ they be happy when you are miserable. Either way, it pleases you to see them both die, although the greed that isn’t yours is disappointed to see the jewel disappear._ _

__Later, you curse a monk who was unlucky enough to both cross your path and piss you off at the same time, and for kicks you curse all his descendants too._ _

__You spend the next fifty years intermittently sulking and dishing out random acts of petty cruelty. By the time the Shikon no Tama resurfaces, you have long since given up searching for any kind of happiness, any reprieve from your anguish. You take solace only in that eventually, you will do something terrible to someone and it will make them hate you enough that one day they will kill you for it._ _

__You spend those fifty years waiting to die, and then the jewel resurfaces and before you know it you’re _dreaming,_ dreaming as you’ve never done before. You are dreaming of the life you could have with the jewel’s power- it’s in your nature, your very being, to want it, but now you have something to _do_ with it once it’ in your grasp.  
You are going to take the jewel, and you are going to make yourself a new life. With it, you will no longer be a patchwork monster, made of other people’s feelings. You will be yourself, and no one but yourself._ _

**Author's Note:**

> I regret none of this. However, admittedly, a lot of this is not canon, but is _is_ an extrapolation from canon. Canonically, Naraku despises that he has Onigumo's heart, despises the feelings he inherited from his origins, despises that he's hanyou, despises his own inability to remove Onigumo from himself. And it's that last bit that really interested me, and that I wanted to work with. Love (if you can call it that) and greed and hatred are what made him, and though he may despise his components, without them he's unable to exist. I wanted to explore what it must have felt like to be him- to be born out of hatred and despair and lust, to realize that you will never be free and that you will never be anything than the sum of what made you, to be forced for as long as you live to feel someone else's emotions, emotions that aren't yours and that you don't want. To never know if what you're feeling is truly your own emotions, and what feelings are ones you're forced to feel because they made you.
> 
> To know that you are made out of things that the world had no use for, that no one wanted. Knowing that you are an abomination and should never have existed, to never be able to escape your own birth, because no matter how much time passes, no matter where you go, you're carrying it with you inside your body. Knowing you'll never be able to escape what you are, being unable to change. That's what I wanted to explore.
> 
> Canonically, there are a lot of parallels between Inuyasha and Naraku- both hanyou, both seeking the jewel, both in love with Kikyou, both conflicted over their love of Kikyou, both with serious self-loathing about being hanyou. Here, I just sort of took that and ran with it. So maybe this is a bit melodramatic, maybe it's OOC, but hey- we don't really know _what_ Naraku did during those fifty years, so in a way it's fair game.


End file.
